The Door Prize That Keeps On Giving

Like most North American cities (as was discussed on this blog a couple of days ago), Regina has cycling infrastructure that ranges from terrible to non-existent. If you’re a casual cyclist, it’s merely annoying. But if you are someone who rides a bike on your daily commute to work, for transportation to social events, and to run errands, it’s a serious problem.

There are many in this city who clearly hold the opinion that bikes have no place in regular vehicular traffic. At least that’s the impression they give by the way they hang out their car windows and holler at those of us white knuckling it along side the half ton pickup trucks. Well guess what? We feel the exact same way. Most cyclists would much rather have their own set of infrastructure, completely separate from traffic. As it stands, we’re far more observant of car lanes than drivers are of ours. To illustrate this point, New York City cyclist Casey Neistat made this video of the sort of obstacles blindly placed in bike lanes that cyclists are just expected to negotiate their way around. While Regina isn’t exactly New York, we at least have this in common.

One thought on “The Door Prize That Keeps On Giving”

They say cycling in Detroit is amazing because the roads are wide, flat, and mostly-vacant, built for wide automobiles in the 40s and 50s. A public transportation policy dictated by the auto industry has ironically left a tremendous cycling experience for bikers. Sadly, the same can’t be said for the city that Detroit’s super-wide inter-state highways (to the suburbs) left behind.

“Boom” or not, I started to notice way more cars and trucks on our roads, at all hours, beginning at 5am, about 7-8 years ago. It’s like we keep breaking down the barriers of rational thought and good behaviour – Hell, we wanna go somewhere now, for some take-out, whatever, we go. I think Reginans used to be way more discerning about how often and where-to they would suddenly drive to.

As for our infrastructure, yeah, dictated by land developers with zero, even less than zero concern for bike-a-bility.